Quick: Can you sing all six verses of Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land”?

If you can, you’re a folkie, a Pete Seeger devotee, a compleatist—anything, in short, but the average survivor of an American public school education in the 1960s and ’70s, when the song became a contender for parallel-universe national anthem, alongside “America the Beautiful” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

If you can’t, then, like most folks since Woody published the song in its first form in 1940, you likely know only the chorus. Admittedly, it’s a good start. You may know the first verse, too, with its evocation of endless Kerouackian highways and sun-dappled prairies. You may even have the perfect phrase “diamond deserts” rattling around in your head.

But no trespassing signs and relief lines? That’s where the song gets interesting. We’ll let Steve Earle tell the story in the clip below—and the differences between the 1956 version, with the “official” lyrics here, and the 1940 are to be noted. You can also hear a rousing version on Neil Young’s new album Americana.

Meanwhile, we’re fast on the centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth. It took a whole for his native Oklahoma to acknowledge her wandering son, whose guitar bore the slogan “this machine kills fascists” and whose lyrics spoke of a politics born of rural deprivation, of the Great Depression, of a time in a land that was decidedly not yours and mine. But now a foundation in Tulsa, not far from his birthplace in Okemah, is building a museum to house his archives. And in Okemah, a well-meant if perhaps not perfectly executed statue of Guthrie now stands alongside westward-tending Route 66, keeping an eye out on the passing show.

A tip of the hat, cap, hardhat, and sombrero, then, to Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, gone but, as long as “This Land Is Your Land” is sung, whether in whole or part, not forgotten.